In an existing mobile telecommunications system, data content requested by user equipment (User Equipment, UE) is transmitted in two manners: a unicast manner and a multicast manner. In the unicast transmission manner, a point-to-point unicast mechanism is used to send user data, that is, an independent transmission channel is established for each user. Even though different users need to receive same data content, the data content needs to be sent to each user once. In the multicast transmission manner, for a real-time service, different users may access a network at any time, and receive content from a same data channel. In this manner, a network side transmits only a same piece of data content that needs to be received by multiple users.
A Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service, MBMS) technology in an existing Long Term Evolution (Long Term Evolution, LTE) system supports broadcast and multicast of a video service. A mobile TV (Mobile TV) service is used as an example, when it is required to watch a Mobile TV, a UE receives corresponding video service data according to service resource allocation information indicated by a network, and the data is presented on the UE to a user.
However, in an existing MBMS service transmission manner, a user can start to receive video data only from a time point of access and watch video content, and a network cannot dynamically instruct the user to receive a temporarily initiated MBMS service, for example, a piece of big news that is added temporarily and pushed.